Willets is the real silly billy

In criticising universities that were planning to charge the new maximum tuition fees of £9,000 per year, Universities Minister David Willetts said: “It would be a great pity if we had this idea that you have to charge a very high price in order to establish prestige.”

But this is inevitable. Cambridge and Oxford, along with Imperial, have already announced that they plan to charge the maximum amount, and all of the smart money says that Warwick will be among those following suit. When the very best charge the most, prestige and price become automatically linked, and in order to keep up the universities will have to charge this amount.
Willetts’ quite ingenious way of dissuading universities from these fees was to scathingly inform them that they will “look silly” – a statement sure to have Nigel Thrift and his buddies losing sleep.

His reasoning behind this is of course simple: he knows it will be he who looks silly. He opened the door to sky-high fees, apparently with some misguided impression that universities would unilaterally decide to gradually increase their fees without regulations preventing a jump to the top boundary. He has, as every single student marching on Millbank last year would tell you, been proven wrong, and that he could not predict this demonstrates his incompetence.

The coalition has now delayed its white paper on higher education in panic at how this price-setting will go. What Willetts does not seem to acknowledge in encouraging a ‘range of fees’, however, is that this brings its own issues. Price and prestige do go hand in hand, and as such student who have the potential to go to a top university will see the lower fees of other universities – and if they are from a less well-off family then this is of course going to seem more tempting.

The misguidedness of the fees plans can be clearly seen as the loose ends which need tying up in the white paper show just how problematic they will be. Universities are mostly independent, so there’s not much ministers can do to further restrict how much they charge once the higher education bill passes.

The Government has forced itself into a lose-lose situation except, of course, they are not the ones who will be losing out.